“Ah, ze dam rain,” growled Bagasse. “She will wet our jacket for us.”
Harrington turned away, cast off the painter, and the boat moved out a little way from her moorings.
“How’ll you have her, John?” whispered the Captain, referring to the arrangement of the sails.
“There’ll be a streaming wind presently,” replied Harrington, with a glance at the sky. “We’d better have two reefs in the mainsail and one in the jib. Then she’ll drive.”
The Captain and Wentworth seized the halyards, and up went the sails. Harrington took the tiller, and while they busied themselves at the reefing nettles, the boat moved silently through the black water between the long vista made by the dark hulls of the vessels on either side. The wind was in the lull preceding the tempest, but it was sufficient to belly the sail, and push them with silent swiftness before it. Large drops of rain plashed on the little vessel and in the dark water as they went on. Presently, Bagasse, with a Frenchman’s aversion to wet, went forward muttering, and crept into the cuddy. The Captain sat on the thwart with the mainsheet in his hand, and Wentworth beside him. Harrington, with one hand on the tiller, was silently brooding on the ghostly effect of the dark hulls and piers on either side, which made the place seem like the black wharves of Acheron.
Silently, amidst the soft plashing of the sprinkling rain, they glided out into the salt smell of the open harbor, and as the blue lightning shook over the broad vault and dark sea, they saw a boat with several rowers shoot across their bows at a distance of about thirty yards. It was the harbor police, and their boat at once hove to.
“Hallo there,” roared a rough voice over the waters—“who’s that, and where are you bound such a night as this?”
“It’s me, Belcher,” shouted the Captain. “Eldad Fisher and the Polly Ann. Goin’ down on business.”
The Polly Ann glided past the police boat as he spoke.